Current functions and semantic evolution of derepente in Chilean Spanish
Authors
Darío Rojas Gallardo
Departamento de Lingüística, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile, Ignacio Carrera Pinto 1025, Ñuñoa, Santiago
The present study attempts to investigate into the origin of the pragmatic-discoursal value, on the basis of the studies of grammaticalisation, of the construction de repente both in Chilean Spanish and in some other South American varieties. The pragmaticvalue developed by this construction -marker of epistemic modalitywith the specifi c function of mitigating the argumentative force of theutterance that it modifi es- has originated from a metaphor, viewed incognitive terms, in which the ‘low frequency' meaning which is partof one of its lexical denotations (equivalent to a veces / sometimes)is transferred from the domain of dictum to the domain of modus,and ends up providing information on the speaker's belief that theevent referred to in dictum may occur or may be true. This metaphoris the last stage of a chain of semantic change that begins with theoriginal value of the locution, equivalent to súbitamente / suddenly,followed by, as an intermediate and crucial stage, where it takes thesemantic meaning of a veces / sometimes. The research is foundedon the scanning of the occurrences of the locution in a synchronicand diachronic corpus, followed by the identifi cation of its pragmaticfunctions in discourse, and establishing a tentative periodicity of itssemantic and pragmatic evolution in discourse.
Rojas Gallardo, D. (2008). Current functions and semantic evolution of derepente in Chilean Spanish. Boletín De Filología, 43(1), Pág. 207–237. Retrieved from https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/18051
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